Monthly Archives: October 2014

Just finished this YA offering from Sean Hayden and Untold Press. Posted this review on Amazon:

I forgot how much I enjoyed the first book in this series (MY SOUL TO KEEP) by Sean Hayden, but I was reminded as I read this one. Sean has a keen sense of story and plot, and everything moved right along about how you’d want it to! I’m giving it five stars because I haven’t had this much pure fun reading a novel in a while (although I’ve read plenty of books I truly enjoyed).

If there’s a quibble, it’s that Connor seems a little too mature in his dealings with his girlfriend and his sister. Sometimes I think he’s missing the 15-year-old attitude a little more than is called for by his, um, condition. But otherwise I think that the other thing that Sean has a good ear for is dialogue, and when you put the two together (story and dialogue) you end up with a pretty darned good book! Enjoyable for young adults and old adults (like me).

That pretty much says it all for me on the book.

Untold Press is Sean’s (and Jen Wylie’s) publishing company, and so far I’ve enjoyed the fiction I’ve read coming out of their small press. That said, it’s been mostly stuff by Sean Hayden and Jen Wylie.

I have never placed any of my works in either of these programs up until now. But as of today, all of my short stories are enrolled in both of them for the next 90 days. This means that Amazon Prime members can download any of my short stories as their “borrows” for a particular month, and Kindle Unlimited subscribers can borrow my stories and read them as part of their monthly subscription fee.

The stories are as follows:

Sole Occupant (and The Only Solution)

Odd Man Out (and The House at the Bend in the Road)

Jack’o’lantern (and The Moment and Sarah’s Puppy)

The Gateway (and America’s Pastime and Hot Spot)

Dead or Alive

Night Family

Rick’s Rules

If you have either of those services, and want to give my short stories a try, well, here’s your chance to do so for free. I will take advantage of KDP Select’s program where I can make my short stories free for a couple of days and will post here and on FB when I do so. Thanks!

Ran across the internet site The Short List, who posted this list of “dystopian novels.” The list was controversial, omitting plenty of good novels and listing some that were arguable, like THE HUNGER GAMES and ARTICLE 5. Also it mixed “dystopian” with “post-apocalyptic” novels as if there were no difference.

I think it’s likely that both dystopian and post-apocalyptic stories attract many of the same readers. I know I am attracted to both. But is there a difference? In many comments, it is argued that post-apocalyptic novels are a subset of dystopian fiction, while others argue that the two are separate, closely related perhaps, but both branches occupy the same level of whatever tree one might be making to categorize science fiction.

I have my own “End of the World” list of both types of novels on Amazon on which I tried to stick with “post-apocalyptic” types of novels. I did not include classic dystopian stories like Orwell’s 1984 or P.K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? because they don’t paint a picture of a society that’s been wiped out by some catastrophe (hence, the “apocalyptic” part of the genre tag). I stick to stories describing the world after something decimates (not literally; “decimate” means eliminate one of every ten people, I think) human society. In The Stand, it is disease. Likewise in Edward W. Robertson’s Breakers novels. In Hugh Howey’s Wool, it is another form of disease brought on by nano-bots. In Lucifer’s Hammer by Niven and Pournelle, it is an asteroid hitting the Earth. In Stephen Baxter’s Arkand Flood, it is a flood of super-biblical proportions that destroys the environment as we know it. In Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, it’s Ice-9. (Read the book! It’s lots of fun!) In David Brin’s The Postman, it’s nuclear war. In a bunch of books, it’s zombies! How do the zombies get created out of your friends and neighbors? Disease, usually.

I see “dystopian” as being something different. I see it as a society that’s gone “off track”. Orwell’s vision is the classic example. Suzanne Collins paints a dystopian society in her Hunger Games trilogy, and so does Veronica Roth in her Divergent novels. (Apparently, The Hunger Games is a blatant rip-off of another earlier novel, possibly of Japanese origin, which I’d never heard of…but the knowledgeable commenters knew all about it.) Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged paints a dystopia of sorts, and apparently so does her novel Anthem. (I’ve read the first, not the second, and I remain unimpressed with the “philosophy” found in Atlas Shrugged, but that’s just me.) A lot of current young adult fiction can be categorized as dystopian, especially The Giver. How about The Maze Runner? Dystopian, and possibly post-apocalyptic (I haven’t read the follow-ups yet.) (Oh, and I know The Giver isn’t really current, but my kids were both assigned it for school reading recently, so for me it’s current…)

Anyway, lots of good suggestions for reading were given in the comments, and I plan on checking out a few of them. There’s something about the current crop of dystopian novels, especially the YA stuff, that grabs me – maybe it’s the attention to social orders as we see them today, and the way that kids relate to one another. Maybe it’s just that it’s more accessible, with a more modern style of writing. I don’t know. But I know for me, it’s sometimes hard to get to the excellent story, because of the style in which an older novel was written. Earth Abides and On The Beach are both like that for me; so is Brave New World. Great, if frightening visions of the future, but stylistically, they seem to take more concentration or something, and seem harder to get into, for me at least.

If you have comments about any of this, I’d love to hear them. (And I really don’t need to hear from the Vuitton Bags or Nike whatever spammers anymore…everything gets caught in the spam filter and I delete it all because I simply don’t have time to check four or five hundred posts…)